Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-669899f699-vbsjw Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-04-29T13:36:18.828Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

7 - Informal Logical Fallacies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

By
Jane Risen  and
Thomas Gilovich
Edited by
Robert J. Sternberg ,
Henry L. Roediger III  and
Diane F. Halpern
Jane Risen
Affiliation:
Cornell University
Thomas Gilovich
Affiliation:
Cornell University
Robert J. Sternberg
Affiliation:
Yale University, Connecticut
Henry L. Roediger III
Affiliation:
Washington University, St Louis
Diane F. Halpern
Affiliation:
Claremont McKenna College, California
Get access

Summary

Premise 1: All good chapters begin with a pithy quote.

Premise 2: We do not begin with a pithy quote.

Conclusion: This is not a good chapter.

Is this a valid conclusion? According to formal logic, it is. Formally, an argument is valid if the conclusion follows from the premises (whether or not the premises are true) and is invalid if it does not. Thus, formal logic is only concerned with the rules for drawing conclusions from a given set of premises (Baron, 1994). It does not specify a standard for evaluating the premises themselves (except, of course, to the extent that the premises were derived as conclusions from other premises).

This chapter focuses on informal logic. Unlike formal logic, informal logic seeks standards for the generation and evaluation of premises. Thus, if Premise 1 is not supported by sufficient evidence, then, according to informal logic, the conclusion about the chapter is not valid. So don't despair: This chapter may have more promise than our opening syllogism would compel you to conclude.

A second difference between formal logic and informal logic is that formal logic deals with certainty, and therefore does not offer a way to weigh the reasonableness of multiple valid or invalid conclusions (Baron, 1994). For instance, if the first premise were, “Some good chapters begin with pithy quotes,” the conclusion would be invalid.

Type
Chapter
Information
Critical Thinking in Psychology , pp. 110 - 130
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2006

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Book purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Anderson, C. A., Lepper, M. R., & Ross, L.(1980). Perseverance of social theories: The role of explanation in the persistence of discredited information. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 39, 1037–1049.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Arkes, H. R., & Blumer, C. (1985). The psychology of sunk cost. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 35, 124–140.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baron, J. (1994). Thinking and deciding (2nd ed.). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Bassok, M., & Trope, Y.(1984). People's strategies for testing hypotheses about another's personality: Confirmatory or diagnostic?Social Cognition, 2, 199–216.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bazerman, M. H. (1998). Judgment in managerial decision making (4th ed.). New York: Wiley.Google Scholar
Bodenhausen, G. V. (1990). Stereotypes as judgmental heuristics: Evidence of circadian variations in discrimination. Psychological Science, 1, 319–322.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cacioppo, J. T., Priester, J. R., & Berntson, G. G.(1993). Rudimentary determinants of attitudes. II. Arm flexion and extension have differential effects on attitudes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 65, 5–17.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Chaiken, S., Liberman, A., & Eagly, A. H. (1989). Heuristic and systematic processing within and beyond the persuasion context. In Uleman, J. S. & Bargh, J. A. (Eds.), Unintended thought (pp. 212–252). New York: Guilford Press.Google Scholar
Dawes, R. M. (2001). Everyday irrationality. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.Google Scholar
Dawson, E., Gilovich, T., & Regan, D. T.(2002). Motivated reasoning and performance on the Wason selection task. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 28, 1379–1387.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ditto, P. H., & Lopez, D. F.(1992). Motivated skepticism: Use of differential decision criteria for preferred and nonpreferred conclusions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 63, 568–584.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Doosje, B., Spears, R., & Koomen, W.(1995). When bad isn't all bad: Strategic use of sample information in generalization and stereotyping. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 69, 642–655.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Falk, R., & Konold, C.(1997). Making sense of randomness: Implicit encodings as a basis for judgment. Psychological Review, 104, 301–318.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fischhoff, B. (1975). Hindsight is not equal to foresight: The effect of outcome knowledge on judgment under uncertainty. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 1, 288–299.Google Scholar
Fiske, S. T., & Neuberg, S. L. (1990). A continuum of impression formation, from category-based to individuating processes: Influences of information and motivation on attention and interpretation. In Zanna, M. P. (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 23, pp. 1–74). New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Gilovich, T. (1987). Secondhand information and social judgment. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 23, 59–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gilovich, T. (1991). How we know what isn't so: The fallibility of human reason in everyday life. New York: The Free Press.Google Scholar
Gilovich, T., & Savitsky, K. (2002). Like goes with like: The role of representativeness in erroneous and pseudo-scientific beliefs. In Gilovich, T., Griffin, D., & Kahneman, D. (Eds.), Heuristics and biases (pp. 617–624). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Griffin, D., & Ross, L. (1991). Subjective construal, social inference, and human misunderstanding. In Zanna, M. P. (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 24, pp. 319–359). San Diego: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Hanslin, J. M. (1967). Craps and magic. American Journal of Sociology, 73, 316–330.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hastorf, A., & Cantril, H.(1954). They saw a game: A case study. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 49, 129–134.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Janis, I. (1972). Victims of groupthink: A psychological study of foreign-policy decisions and fiascoes. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.Google Scholar
Johnson, E. J., Hershey, J., Meszaros, J., & Kunreuther, H.(1993). Framing, probability distortions, and insurance decisions. Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, 7, 35–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kahneman, D., & Frederick, S. (2002). Representativeness revisited. In Gilovich, T., Griffin, D., & Kahneman, D. (Eds.), Heuristics and biases (pp. 49–81). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A.(1973). On the psychology of prediction. Psychological Review, 80, 237–251.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kerr, N. L., MacCoun, R. J., & Kramer, G. P.(1996). Bias in judgment: Comparing individuals and groups. Psychological Review, 103, 687–719.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Keysar, B. (1993). Common sense and adult theory of communication. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 16, 54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Keysar, B. (1994). The illusory transparency of intention: Linguistic perspective taking in text. Cognitive Psychology, 26, 165–208.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Krantz, D. H., Fong, G. T., & Nisbett, R. E. (1983). Formal training improves the application of statistical heuristics to everyday problems. Unpublished manuscript. Murray Hill, NJ: Bell Laboratories.Google Scholar
Lehman, D. R., Lempert, R. O., & Nisbett, R. E.(1988). The effects of graduate training on reasoning: Formal discipline and thinking about everyday life events. American Psychologist, 43, 431–432.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lerner, J., & Tetlock, P. E.(1999). Accounting for the effects of accountability. Psychological Bulletin, 125, 255–275.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Levine, J. M., & Moreland, R. L. (1998). Small groups. In Gilbert, D. T., Fiske, S. T., & Lindzey, G. (Eds.), The handbook of social psychology (4th ed., Vol. 2, pp. 415–469). New York: McGraw-Hill.Google Scholar
Lichtenstein, S., Slovic, P., Fischhoff, B., Layman, M., & Combs, B.(1978). Judged frequency of lethal events. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory, 4, 551–578.Google Scholar
Lord, C. G., Ross, L., & Lepper, M. R.(1979). Biased assimilation and attitude polarization: The effects of prior theories on subsequently considered evidence. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 37, 2098–2109.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Newton, E. (1990). Overconfidence in the communication of intent: Heard and unheard melodies. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Stanford University.Google Scholar
Nisbett, R. E., Fong, G. T., Lehman, D. R., & Cheng, P. W.(1987). Teaching reasoning. Science, 238, 625–631.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Nisbett, R. E., & Ross, L. (1980). Human inference: Strategies and shortcomings of social judgment. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.Google Scholar
Petty, R., & Caccioppo, J. (1986). The elaboration likelihood model of persuasion. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 19, pp. 123–205). San Diego: Academic Press.
Pronin, E., Gilovich, T., & Ross, L.(2004). Objectivity in the eye of the beholder: Divergent perceptions of bias in self versus other. Psychological Review, 111, 781–799.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pronin, E., Lin, D. Y., & Ross, L.(2002). The bias blind spot: Perceptions of bias in self versus others. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 28, 369–381.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ross, L., Lepper, M. R., & Hubbard, M.(1975). Perserverance in self perception and social perception: Biased attributional processes in the debriefing paradigm. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 32, 880–892.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ross, L., & Ward, A. (1996). Naive realism: Implications for social conflict and misunderstanding. In Brown, T., Reed, E., & Turiel, E. (Eds.), Values and knowledge (pp. 103–135). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Schaffner, P. E. (1985). Specious learning about reward and punishment. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 48, 1377–1386.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schaller, M. (1991). Social categorization and the formation of group stereotypes: Further evidence for biased information processing in the perception of group-behavior correlations. European Journal of Social Psychology, 21, 25–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Skov, R. B., & Sherman, S. J.(1986). Information-gathering processes: Diagnosticity, hypothesis-confirmatory strategies, and perceived hypothesis confirmation. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 22, 93–121.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sloman, S. A. (1996). The empirical case for two systems of reasoning. Psychological Bulletin, 119, 3–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Snyder, M., & Swann, W. B.(1978). Hypothesis-testing processes in social interaction. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 36, 1202–1212.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stanovich, K. E., & West, R. F. (2002). Individual differences in reasoning. In Gilovich, T., Griffin, D., & Kahneman, D. (Eds.), Heuristics and biases (pp. 421–440). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tetlock, P. E., Skitka, L., & Boettger, R.(1989). Social and cognitive strategies for coping with accountability: Conformity, complexity, and bolstering. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 57, 632–640.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Thaler, R. H. (1980). Toward a positive theory of consumer choice. Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 1, 39–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thompson, M. S., Judd, C. M., & Park, B.(2000). The consequences of communicating social stereotypes. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 36, 567–599.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D.(1974). Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases. Science, 185, 1124–1131.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Vallone, R., Ross, L., & Lepper, M. R.(1985). The hostile media phenomenon: Biased perception and perceptions of media bias in coverage of the “Beirut Massacre.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 49, 577–585.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Vos Savant, M. (1996). The power of logical thinking. New York: St. Martin's Griffin.Google Scholar
Zajonc, R. B. (1980). Feeling and thinking: Preferences need no inferences. American Psychologist, 35, 151–175.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×